Parents press for air conditioning in Oak Park elementary schools

Students rotated into the few cooled classrooms during heat wave

Water, room rotations and ice pops are no replacement for air conditioning at Oak Park's elementary schools, frustrated parents told School District 97 officials this week.

As temperatures climbed to the mid-90s, parents renewed concerns about the lack of temperature control that some view as a basic necessity. Few classrooms in the district's eight elementary schools have air conditioning.

"This is a huge obstacle to their learning at this point," Zerrin Bulut, who has two children in the district, told the school board this week. Students struggle just "to make it through the day," much less learn new material, Bulut said.

Administrators have been cycling students through the few air-conditioned rooms in the schools while trying to keep students hydrated, Superintendent Al Roberts said. He told parents the district had attempted to serve ice pops Tuesday but could not freeze them before the end of the school day.

Some have suggested canceling school, purchasing window cooling units or moving kids into offices of district administrators, who work in an air-conditioned building.

But not all parents are that alarmed, Roberts said. Although he received many requests to close the schools, other parents raised concerns about child care if classes were canceled.

"Keeping kids in school was better than the alternative for many of our parents," Roberts said.

The district has found at least one case of a child with an illness that might have been caused by the heat, District 97 spokesman Chris Jasculca said.

On Tuesday, 24 students left school early, Jasculca said.

Adding air conditioning would cost from $1.25 million to $2.25 million per school, Board President Robert Spatz told parents during the Tuesday school board meeting. Spatz reminded parents that the district is operating on a limited budget.

"At this point, it would all be local tax dollars," he said.

The district's facilities committee is researching the options, and the board expects a presentation from the committee in October, Spatz said.

The earliest the district could get air conditioning would be summer 2014, and it likely would not come to all schools at once because classrooms need to be available for summer school, he said.

Trustees reiterated there are no easy answers in multimillion-dollar spending decisions.

"This is one major capital investment among many major capital investments" the board is considering, Trustee Peter Traczyk said.